Wadworth Brewery is phasing in Paragon’s routeing and scheduling software linked to TomTom vehicle tracking to replace a manual system.

The 137 year old Wiltshire brewery is using the system to automate delivery planning to 700 own-pubs and free-trade establishments across southern and western England.

“The software will help us to streamline our ‘Wadworthshire’ routes across our vehicle fleet – we’ll even include the deliveries completed by our shire horses, which I believe is a first for Paragon,” said Jon Grellier, supply chain manager at Wadworth Brewery.

Initially, the brewery will use the system to review its current delivery strategy, model the most efficient routes and establish best use of its delivery fleet. It will enable the brewery to allocate optimal loads to vehicles, smoothing the workloads across the delivery team according to vehicle and staff availability and driver hours.

“The ability to review our delivery operation is critical as we are seeing strong growth in our free-trade business. We’ll be able to use Paragon’s Single Depot software to look at different delivery scenarios to help us to enhance our service levels. It also gives us the ability to allocate workloads fairly, reasonably and safely across the delivery team,” says Jon Grellier.

Paragon Fleet Controller will link the routing software to Wadworth’s vehicle tracking system supplied by TomTom in real time. This will allow the planning team to compare live vehicle movements against the transport plan, enabling fine tuning of the routes and schedules.

Wadworth is also considering using the system to provide arrival time updates to customers. Strategic use of the software will begin immediately, with the brewery aiming for complete automation of its transport planning by late summer 2012.